Always a River: The Ohio River and the American Experience (1991) Edited By Robert L. Reid

For almost the entirety of my life Lake Michigan was the dominant geographic feature of where I lived – childhood in the Indiana Dunes, and as an adult in Chicago.  When I retired earlier this year, I moved to Golconda, a small town in southern Illinois where the Ohio River reigns as the dominant geographic feature.  My new home is three blocks from the river -- and importantly, on a hill.  I’ve been studying my surroundings ever since I arrived.  Geography is a key part of local history.

Golconda, before bridges, was originally an Ohio River ferry-crossing between Illinois and Kentucky.  Later, it became home to Lock and Dam 51, part of the massive infrastructure of the “interior coast” of America.  Since the early 1800s, controlling the navigation of the Ohio and its dozens of tributaries has been a major government concern, the nuts and bolts of which was not known to me.  As I often do, I found a book to help explain it to me. 

The book, Always a River, is edited by Robert Reid, Professor of History Emeritus at the University of Southern Indiana, upriver from Golconda.  The book is a compilation of essays by various experts on topics relating to the Ohio River, which streams from Pittsburgh, to its mouth at Cairo, IL (63 miles downriver from me) where it merges into the Mississippi River.  The essays cover such topics as: Native history; the importance of the river in colonial times (French & Indian Wars, War of 1812, and War of Independence); settlement by European immigrants; early industrialization, coal, salt & clay mining,  coal powered electricity, steelmaking, hydro-energy (the TVA includes the Tennessee River, a tributary of the Ohio), uranium enrichment; and the impact all of that has had on river ecology including its role in acid rain.  Also in the book are parts of Reuben Gold Thwaites’ fun “travelogue” Afloat on the Ohio, which I previously read and blogged back in 2015..

One of the key takeaways I have from this book is the chapter on the changing navigation of the river over the years.  What I never realized (or thought about actually) before is that the Ohio River is not particularly deep – wide, but not deep.  Rainy seasons, and dry seasons, greatly impacted the traffic on the river.  Seasonal changes among other factors led to Congress directing the Army Corps of Engineers to develop and implement a plan to make navigation on the Ohio River possible year-round: clearing snags, dredging, wing dams, canalization (part 1) and deeper & longer canalization (part 2).  Not to mention the changes in shipping: canoes, flat boats, keel boats, steamboats, tugboats & barges.  Sounds boring?  It was actually fascinating to this non-engineer. 

Lock and Dam 51 in Golconda, by-the-way, no longer is.  It was built to handle narrow and short barge traffic.  It, along with Dam 50 (Marion, KY), has been dismantled and replaced by the Smithland Lock & Dam (between Golconda & Brookport), capable of handling longer, heavier, barges.  All that remains of Lock and Dam 51 are a row of houses constructed for its Lockmaster staff. Today, those riverfront houses are available as vacation rentals. 

Recommendation:  Yes, for history buffs.

The Polly O'Keefe Quartet (1965 - 1989) By Madeleine L'Engle

Earlier this year, I read a Library of America (LOA) collection of four Madeleine L’Engle novels known as The Wrinkle in Time Quartet.  The novels are science fiction, with a theology subplot.  All four featured the Murray family: married scientists with four children, a daughter named Meg, and her three younger brothers, all exceeding smart.  Meg is the narrator of the series.  At the end of the series, it is evident that Meg will marry Calvin O’Keefe, a character in the novels.

The LOA has now published a second collection of L’Engle novels, The Polly O’Keefe Quartet, which I finished earlier today.  Polly is the daughter of Meg & Calvin, a teenager, she is the oldest of the seven O’Keefe children.  This second series, while a continuation of the first, is very different.  The novels still can be classified as science fiction, and they emphasize even more so the theology, but my guess is L’Engle was testing her skills at other literary genres when she wrote these.  In this quartet, you can find international espionage, romance, environmental activism, and a significant teenage girl coming-of-age aspect that wasn’t really present in Wrinkle in Time.   Significantly, the closing novel, An Acceptable Time, returns to the time-travel plot presented in the first novel, A Wrinkle in Time.

The four novels are:  The Arm of the Starfish, 232 pages, published in 1965; Dragons in the Water, 252 pages, published in 1976; A House Like a Lotus, 242 pages, published in 1984; and An Acceptable Time, 242 pages, published in 1989.

Recommendation:  Yes, I’ve enjoyed reading these.  As with the first collection, it is important to read them in sequence.

Red Star Over China: The Classic Account of the Birth of Chinese Communism (1938) By Edgar Snow

This week as the Chinese celebrate the 70-year anniversary of the People’s Republic of China and the Communist Party consolidation of power, China finds itself as the lead story on two major international news fronts: a trade war with the United States, and a battle of attrition with Hong Kong.  The issues behind both of these news stories are not new, but the bargaining dynamics have changed in these seven decades. To overstate it, China has long ago ceased being a third world country, in fact, it no longer needs to bargain at all.

Everything about state policy is governed by China's history, a direct result of a disreputable and abusive mistreatment by colonial powers (including the United States) and their Chinese puppets. This history, unknown to or forgotten by those who still try to bully China today, shapes Beijing’s world view. And why shouldn’t it?  Concurrent with PRC's short history, the world has witnessed an uneasy stalemate with the former Soviet Union under the reality of mutually assured nuclear destruction.  And now with China, what looms is a mutually assured economic destruction … there will be no winners.

Lost to western policymakers was that the cause of overthrowing imperial dynastic rule in China did not start as a matter of Communists vs. Nationalists. It was a matter of Chinese vs. foreigners & their puppets.  Did the political split have to occur?  One can make a convincing argument that the Nationalist leader Chiang Kai-shek was merely another western puppet, backed & bankrolled by the U.S. and other western nations who bet on the Nationalists to protect “their” interests -- and lost that bet. The Chinese peasantry on the other hand, including Mao Tse-tung who was extremely well read in western democratic writings, had no other choice but to seek allies where available to protect the interests of the Chinese people.  At the time, that available ally would have been the Soviet Union.

American & western contact with, and understanding of, what was going on in China beyond the treaty ports was limited.  Next to nothing was known about the Communists who seemed to be winning popular support among the “peasants.” Until that is, Edgar Snow an American journalist was invited into the Chinese interior stronghold of Yenan where Mao Tse-tung and other revolutionaries had sought refuge to regroup after the legendary Long March.  The invitation had a motive, Mao hoped to tell the world the other side of the story.

Snow would spend several months living in Mao’s camp, conversing with him daily and informally.  Snow would write the first western published biography of Mao, his policy beliefs, and how he & the Community Party captured the loyalty of the masses, building them into a peoples’ movement strong enough to expel the machinations of the more modern, more powerful, western world.

Recommendation: Yes, for any reader of history, especially for the detailed history of the Long March; and anyone interested in current events.